"See, I told you so," she emailed me, "it turned out just like I said. All that talk about positive thinking is just bs. I tried to think that it would be alright, and I said all those positive affirmations; but it still turned out as badly as I thought it might. Please unsubscribe me"

Imagine that.

Time after time, I hear the same refrain from people. They try to use the power of mental magic to affect the circumstances of their lives, but it just does not work for them. They attend some seminar and get all enthused about mental mastery or they read another self-help book that inspires them to change their perspective; but it does not work like it is promised to work.

Affirmations get taped to fridge doors, bathroom mirrors and any other available surface to no avail. Nothing changes. Life still sucks. It is still a struggle. Bad luck outweighs the good and so on. Affirmations do not work, they claim.

But they do. Oh, how they do. 100% of the time.

The problem is that affirmations are misunderstood. They are not just some pretty idealistic words of self-image or accomplishment repeated at odd moments. Everything you believe, everything you feel, everything you think, everything you do and everything you say is an affirmation of who you are and who you are becoming. And, what you will attain and accomplish.

To affirm means to verify the truth. Telling lies to yourself does not make something true, no matter how often you repeat the lies. To change who you are and what you have in life, you must change your core beliefs as well as your predominant repetitive self-talk.

If your core beliefs are of limitation and mediocrity, you cannot expect to achieve excellence just because you repeat a few words a few times a day.

Your core belief systems are ingrained and they rule your repetitive self-talk that goes on non-stop (even when you are sleeping). It takes concerted effort to change one's subconscious self-talk. It takes a true examination of core beliefs to find out what limits the full expression of your potential to self-actuate and succeed.

"It turned out badly, just like I imagined or just like I believed it would, no matter how much I tried that positive thinking stuff and that affirmation stuff." Of course it did and there is your proof that it does work, if you'd only be honest with yourself.

The truth is, no matter how much it is denied, that your thoughts and your beliefs create your reality. Not the stuff you think about at odd moments, but the stuff you think in the background when you are not even paying attention. The stuff you think when you react. Not the stuff you want to believe, but the stuff that you deep-down believe about yourself and life...that's what produces the results.

If you do not ever do the work necessary to examine and change your core beliefs and subconscious self-talk, you cannot expect to change your reality picture- because you are imagining and expecting things to be the way they have always been and they are the way they have always been because of your core beliefs and predominant repetitive self-talk.

If you want success but don't believe you deserve it, you won't get it or won't keep it if, somehow, you manage to luck into it. If you believe that you want to go to heaven some day and also believe that 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven', then you'll not get rich. If you believe that it takes what you don't have to achieve success or that success is somehow tainted, you'll not achieve it.

If your subconscious is constantly telling you how unworthy you are, in some repetitive loop of some parental or teacher's instruction, you'll not be able to break free of that mental prison, until and unless, you make the effort to examine your core beliefs and subconscious programming AND then discard all the crap that does not serve you and replace it with stuff that does.

You will get the results you imagine and expect. What are you imagining? What are you expecting? Those are the questions you need to ask yourself.

Believe it or not...that's the way it works. Imagine that.